The Art, Architecture, Design Film Festival will bring a week's worth of design-related documentary features to the Hot Docs Cinema, on Bloor Street. And, as the festival's official education partner, the Daniels Faculty will be there every step of the way.

That will be especially true on opening night, January 22, when the Daniels Faculty's dean, Richard Sommer, will be participating in a Q&A about Neutra: Survival Through Design, a documentary about the groundbreaking Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra.

Sommer will be joined on stage by the documentary's director, P.J. Letofsky. The conversation will be moderated by former Toronto Star architecture critic Christopher Hume.

For tickets to that screening, or for information about the other films showing at AADFF, visit the Hot Docs website.

Photo: Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House, in Palm Springs, California.

During reading week, which begins on February 17, Daniels Faculty students have an opportunity to do something quite a bit more exciting than hitting the books: associate professor Aziza Chaouni will be taking a few Daniels graduate students along with her to an international design workshop she's leading in Dakar, Senegal.

The focus of the workshop will be the Centre International du Commerce Exterieur du Senegal (CICES), a 19-hectare fairground designed in the early 1970s by French architects Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin. The modernist regional pavilions at CICES expertly reference traditional African building styles, and the grounds and exhibition halls have hosted countless regional and local events. But age and lack of upkeep are starting to take their toll on CICES, leaving its future uncertain.

Participants in Chaouni's workshop will visit CICES, attend lectures by local and international experts, and tour key landmarks in and around Dakar. The group will work with local stakeholders to imagine ways of revitalizing CICES and restoring it to its place as an icon of modern architecture in the region.

The workshop will include students from the Daniels Faculty, the Mackenzie Presbyterian University of Sao Paulo, the Collège Universitaire d'Architecture de Dakar, and the Université Polytechnique G5 of Dakar.

Daniels graduate students interested in joining the workshop have until Friday, January 10 to sign up. Students are responsible for paying their own airfare, but accommodation and transportation in Dakar will be provided free of charge. Some financial assistance may be available through the Office of the Registrar and Student Services. The workshop begins on February 17 and ends on February 21.

If you're a Daniels graduate student who's interested in reserving a spot, claim your place by emailing Aziza Chaouni as soon as possible.

For more details, download the brochure.

By 2003, Don Mills Centre was a relic. It was a large indoor mall marooned amidst sprawling parking lots — a midtown Toronto monument to the excesses of 20th-century suburban planning.

Over the past 15 years, Giannone Petricone Associates, an architecture firm founded by Daniels Faculty associate professor Pina Petricone and alumnus Ralph Giannone (BArch 1987), has worked with the mall's owner, Cadillac Fairview, to redevelop Don Mills Centre into an outdoor, modern shopping destination organized around major public spaces and punctuated by residential towers, including a repurposed 1970’s office building. The former mall is now the heart of a neigbourhood. With that project finally complete, Giannone Petricone is creating new designs for other retail-focused sites across Toronto, including Cloverdale Mall in Etobicoke and the Golden Mile in Scarborough.

On January 18, students and members of the public will have a rare opportunity to find out about this type of suburban intensification directly from the source, when Giannone Petricone joins with DesignTO for an afternoon of learning about the Don Mills redevelopment.

Participants will start the afternoon at Giannone Petricone's offices in downtown Toronto. From there, they'll board a chartered bus and be driven directly to Don Mills, where they'll attend a panel discussion at the Don Mills library branch. On the panel will be Pina Petricone, Ralph Giannone, city planner Leo Desorcy, Metrolinx chief development officer Leslie Woo, and Daniels Faculty assistant professor Michael Piper as moderator. The discussion will focus on the successes of the Don Mills redevelopment, as well as its failings. Attendees can also expect to learn about the ways Metrolinx's Eglinton Crosstown light-rail line, now under construction, will change the design calculus in midtown Toronto by introducing rapid transit to formerly car-dependent precincts.

After the panel, staff from the offices of Giannone Petricone will lead guided tours of the Shops at Don Mills. Attendees will be able to gain firsthand knowledge of the area's redevelopment.

Tickets — which cover the bus ride from downtown, the panel discussion, the walking tour, and a return trip to downtown — are $30 and can be purchased on DesignTO's website. The event will take place on Saturday, January 18, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Athens, the capital of Greece, is an old city with some very typical modern-day problems: it struggles with gridlock, and with providing appropriate housing to its citizens.

But Athens also has some urban issues that are specific to its context. A debt crisis in 2010 cast a lasting pall over the Greek economy, leaving Athens with a number of abandoned buildings. And the city's historic centre, which has been in continuous use for thousands of years, has evolved into a tightly packed cluster of narrow streets lined with postwar concrete apartment blocks, making large-scale redevelopment difficult.

Last year, Athens Anaplasis, a Greek government organization responsible for overseeing urban renewal projects in Athens, held a competition to create a new master plan for the city's historic centre. Daniels Faculty assistant professor Petros Babasikas answered the call. His design, developed in collaboration with Athens-based engineers and a research team made up of Daniels Faculty students, won an honourable mention.

Babasikas has a strong personal connection to Athens: he lived and worked there for 10 years before coming to Toronto. "A good part of my work and research is on the Mediterranean metropolis, and how to deal with the changes that are coming, in terms of the climate crisis and the general decline of the commons," he says. "How do you revitalize public space, and at the same time how do you create resiliency for climate change?"

When he was considering ways of driving renewal in central Athens, he knew that creating iconic public buildings and grand public spaces would be practically impossible: the city's street grid is too tight, its administration is too fragmented, and public investment is too scarce. Instead, he came up with a network of smaller interventions aimed at creating new pockets of green space within the grid and bringing new life to existing buildings. The idea was to replace some of Athens' outmoded concrete multiresidential buildings and car-focused amenities with new, ecologically friendly infrastructure that would help prepare the city for impending environmental and economic challenges. Babasikas titled the project "Athens 2030: The City as a Resilient Waterscape."

The linchpin of the redevelopment proposal is a series of new communal parks built within existing vacant lots and underused spaces in the city core. Some of these parks would be what Babasikas refers to as "parking gardens" — surface parking lots that would be reengineered to serve as public recreational spaces. About two thirds of each parking lot's surface area would be replaced with grass and trees, while the other third would remain as parking space. Cars and park-goers would coexist.

Within these new parks, and also underneath the city's streets, Babasikas and his team envision a renewed network of water infrastructure — including reservoirs, basins, channels, and water towers — which would capture storm runoff while also providing a vital supply line for new, water-based public amenities, like water fountains and splash pads.

A parking garden, with an on-site concrete water tower.

Underground water tanks inside a reprogrammed parking garage.

"The point of this is to give an architectural identity to water," Babasikas says. "Usually infrastructure is hidden. To build a water tower out of a type of concrete that weathers well is a very cheap intervention. But as an expression of these new commons, it's quite important."

Babasikas's plan also has a solution for the city's abandoned buildings, many of which are sturdy concrete mid-rises built after the second world war. Rather than letting them languish, Babasikas and his team would turn them into community hubs by filling them with entrepreneurs. "Each building becomes a co-op," Babasikas says. "There would be work-live scenarios. There would be other places where you would have incubators and high-tech uses, as well as traditional commercial activity." A former bus depot, for example, would become a marketplace.

Although the Athens Anaplasis competition is over, Babasikas's work on his team's proposal continues. He hopes to refine a few of the ideas in the master plan enough that they can be implemented in Athens in a piecemeal fashion, possibly as pilot projects.

The student researchers who assisted Babasikas with Athens 2030 were Miranda Fay, Niko Dellic, Ambika Pharma, Phat Le, Anne Kwan, Thomas Huang, and Marienka Bishop-Kovac. The team's Athens-based engineering consultants were Kyriakos Tyrologos (traffic), Mania Lambrou (planning and environment), and Leto Christodoulopoulou (landscape).

The Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Fund, established by Eve Lewis and family along with colleagues at Woodcliffe Landmark Properties, honours the legacy of Paul Oberman, a property developer known for his restorations of historic landmarks like the North Toronto railway station. Oberman passed away in 2011.

The fund provides research grants to Daniels Faculty students whose work follows Oberman's lead by probing the ways historic architecture is being transformed to meet contemporary needs. For 2019's Paul Oberman recipients, Isaac Neufeld and Heather Richardson, awards from the fund enabled overseas travel that directly influenced both of their Master of Architecture thesis projects.

Isaac Neufeld

Neufeld, who has an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, is interested in the intersection between architecture and infrastructure. When he was considering potential thesis topics, he was drawn to the idea of doing a study of district heating and cooling systems — centralized plants that distribute steam or water to an entire urban district for use in HVAC systems.

"There has been a lot of documentation from organizations like the UN about how district heating and cooling systems are going to be one of the top tools for fighting climate change in cities," Neufeld says. "And so I thought architects should concern themselves with them."

But there was an obstacle to Neufeld's research: many of the most architecturally remarkable examples of district heating and cooling plants are located in western Europe. Making site visits would be prohibitively expensive.

With support from the Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Award, Neufeld was able to go on a grand tour, with stops in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Iceland, and Austria. Along the way, he visited district heating and cooling plants and attended two professional conferences: the Euroheat and Power Congress in Nantes, France, and the Urban Future Global Conference in Oslo, Norway. The award paid for travel, accommodations, and entry fees to the conferences.

Over the course of several months, he was able to visit dozens of sites relevant to his research. One standout was the Leyweg Geothermal Heat Plant, a twin-gabled structure in The Hague that pumps water from 2,000 metres below the earth's surface for use in heating. In Copenhagen, he visited the Borgergade District Cooling Plant, which cleverly emulates the red brick of the city's older buildings to put a people-friendly face on the industrial cooling equipment located within.

Top: the Leyweg Geothermal Heat Plant. Bottom: Borgergade District Cooling Plant. Photographs by Isaac Neufeld.

Neufeld returned to Canada with sketches, photographs, and a whole new understanding of the ways heating and cooling infrastructure can be integrated into the urban fabric. Now he's ready to tackle the biggest project of his academic career: his thesis will investigate ways of incorporating district energy systems into a suburban Toronto neighbourhood.

Photograph by Lauren Meeker.

Heather Richardson

Richardson grew up near Collingwood, Ontario, not far from the Blue Mountain ski resort. "I've been skiing since I could walk," she says.

As she entered her final year in the Daniels Faculty's Master of Architecture program, she decided to turn that lifelong skiing infatuation into a globetrotting thesis project. With the support of the Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Award, she embarked on a tour of modernist ski resorts in France. The goal was to gain an understanding of the ways architects had applied mid-century urbanist ideals to these leisure-focused mountain settings, and to learn about the challenges inherent in designing a community that experiences massive seasonal population swings.

To get a sense of the size of those population swings, she planned her trip for the tail end of summer. "Even mountain biking season was ending," she says. "The resorts were really ghost towns when I went to see them. I got to chat with people who live in these places permanently, which was great."

Her stops included Flaine, a purpose-built French resort that was completed in 1969. Flaine's Bauhaus-style architecture, heavily reliant on precast concrete panels, left a strong impression on her.

At Avoriaz, another French ski village, she took in the architecture of the resort's inviting, cedar-shingled mid-century villas.

She also spent time at Les Arcs, a ski resort designed by the renowned French architect Charlotte Perriand. Richardson was struck by the designer's use of modular, prefabricated forms to produce spaces that are both efficient and beautiful. She was also impressed by the way the resort's buildings hug the slope of the mountain, making them seem like part of the landscape.

Les Arcs. Photograph by Heather Richardson.

For her thesis project, which she presented in December, she developed her own take on a modernist ski resort. Her design took inspiration from the sloping, concrete forms she saw on her European trip. She also added some innovative touches, like a system for physically moving residential modules between an on-hill station and the base of a mountain using the same elevated tramways developed for ski lifts, which Richardson sees as a potential way of increasing a resort's flexibility amidst seasonal population changes.

Image from Heather Richardson's thesis presentation.

"Visiting these communities has given me a great sense of place," she says. "I spent a semester studying European alpine urbanism, but once you're there you really understand the silhouettes of the buildings and how they reflect the mountainscapes behind."

Common Accounts, the office of Igor Bragado and Daniels Faculty sessional lecturer Miles Gertler, had a busy summer in Italy. There, under the auspices of Bragado's fellowship at the Spanish Academy in Rome, they built an unusual pavilion with a roof made of black yoga balls. The intent? To connect the culture of fitness with the rituals of funerals and death.

"The project of self-design has always been central to our office's research," Gertler says. "Understood on a spectrum, architectures of fitness and death both address the construction and deconstruction of the body. The gym and the funeral are fundamentally linked to the design of the human in material terms. The contemporary representation of ourselves online demonstrates a desire to produce and memorialize ritual at the scale of the everyday. This pavilion provides a platform for that.”

The pavilion consists of a smooth aluminum floor, covered with athletic-looking graphics. Up above is some equipment: weights, bars, and a set of black punching bags. The structure is wrapped in a black-and-white print that is actually an enlarged photo of a piece of raw meat. ("Taken from Stamo Papadaki’s unused cover for Sigfried Giedion's book Mechanization Takes Command," Gertler says.) The whole thing is topped off with the black yoga balls and a giant-sized slogan that hints at physical and spiritual rebirth: "REFRESH, RENEW."

A set of silver cabinets houses a rack of servers that are intended to store selfies and videos of visitors to the pavilion, creating space for a sort of virtual afterlife archive within the structure.

Bragado and Gertler refer to the pavilion as a "catafalque for the digital age." (A catafalque is a type of funeral structure that can be used as a platform for a coffin, but is also sometimes used as a substitute for the actual body of the deceased.) They were inspired by the catafalque for Philip IV of Spain, a 17th-century structure that was inscribed with geographic features from the Spanish territories.

"We were interested in architecture that would similarly account for disparate or remote territories," Gertler says. "In this case, data and the body online, and images of the body sublimated to server space."

The pavilion stood in the Piazza San Pietro in Montorio, in Rome, for two months this summer. It's expected to tour other cities in 2020. Here are a few more photos:

In the second year of his graduate architecture studies, Brandon Bergem (MArch 2019) received an award from the Paul Oberman Graduate Student Endowment Fund, which was established by Eve Lewis and family along with Oberman's colleagues at Woodcliffe Landmark Properties. The award provides funding to Daniels Faculty students who have submitted research proposals that promise to probe the ways historic architecture is being transformed to meet contemporary needs.

Bergem decided to use the money to finance a trip to Norway. Once there, he planned to study the country's National Scenic Routes, a series of highways that are dotted with architecturally interesting rest-stop structures.

As an afterthought, he made a detour to Svalbard, a remote archipelago that is host to some of the northernmost human settlements on the planet.

Bergem was so taken with what he saw there that he decided to make it the subject of his 2018 Master of Architecture thesis. That project, titled The Museum of Natural History to Ultima Thule, was recently named the winner of a 2019 Student Award of Excellence from Canadian Architect. The magazine's editors even put one of Bergem's images of the cover of the December issue.

"This work I did during school, which can be very removed from the professional world, is now being recognized by the professional world," Bergem says. "It instills confidence in what I've done."

Svalbard left a deep impression on him. "It's a very barren landscape," he says. "It's just full of glaciers and fjords and the occasional settlement. You'll see old hunting lodges or mining operations, and there are even the remnants of structures that were built to aid different ventures to reach the north pole."

Although Svlabard is part of the Kingdom of Norway, other countries have treaty rights that entitle them to pursue commercial activity there — a continuation of the island chain's centuries-long history as a base for mining, whaling, and other forms of resource extraction. Svalbard's frozen habitats are threatened by climate change, which has recently made the archipelago a site of scientific interest.

Bergem's thesis project imagines a future where climate change and human habitation have altered Svalbard beyond recognition. His work consists of a series of haunting images that show scenes of a fictionalized Svalbard full of megastructures, like a luxury mountaintop hotel and an opulent royal palace (the latter is depicted at the top of this article).

In Bergem's images, these fictional structures are shown in states of ruin or disarray, as their inhabitants race to shore them up against Svalbard's increasingly mercurial climate. One image shows an army of flying drones counteracting the effects of erosion and climate change by reconstructing the island pebble by pebble. Another image shows a mutant polar bear trudging across a rocky outcropping covered in melting permafrost.

"Svalbard is experiencing a large number of landslides as a result of increased precipitation," Bergem says. "The glaciers are melting, the sea level is rising. The standpoint of my thesis was to imagine a point at which the island doesn't exist anymore and look back on its history. I was treating the future as the past within this idea of a museum of natural history."

The Canadian Architect awards jury was impressed with the beauty and power of Bergem's work. "I could linger over these incredible drawings and the tales they evoke for hours," wrote jury member Joe Lobko, a partner at the Toronto-based architecture firm DTAH.

"Brandon has interwoven fact and fiction, given authority by his robust skills in representation," says Bergem's thesis advisor, associate professor John Shnier. "And he has done so in a manner that has created a perfectly plausible location populated by an equally plausible set of tectonic elements. The architecture that emerges makes you want to board a ship to the edge of the world to experience it."

Bergem's imaginative thesis work set him on a path to professional growth. Now, a year after graduating from the Daniels Faculty, he's a designer at Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture.

Here are a few more images from his award-winning project.

Lifting Lonyearbyen:

Hotel at the End of the World:

Primordial Pyramiden:

Instruments of Prophecy:

Monuments:

The Daniels Building is constantly full of students, but on November 12 the crowd was a bit younger than usual.

Alan Robertson, a grade three teacher from Leslieville Junior Public School, brought his class of 22 children to One Spadina for a day of learning about buildings and the people who design them.

The trip was related to the students' science curriculum. "We've been studying the topic of strong and stable structures," Robertson says. "We try to link curriculum to the real world as much as possible."

The youngsters met a pair of undergraduate students, Misha Gliwny and Chris Kang, who showed them some examples of kinetic architecture that they had developed as part of a studio taught by digital fabrication coordinator Nicholas Hoban. Later, the group visited the laser cutter lab, where Hamed Nadi, a work-study student, demonstrated the equipment by cutting keychains for the elementary schoolers to take home with them.

Some of Alan Robertson's grade three students with Daniels Faculty external relations and outreach manager Nene Brode.

Later, the class visited the Daniels Faculty's 3D printers, where digital fabrication technologist Paul Kozak introduced them to 3D-printed models. There was a hands-on workshop where the kids learned to build their own city blocks out of styrofoam, and then the outing ended with a visit to New Circadia, the cavelike art installation in the Daniels Building's new Architecture and Design Gallery.

"They had an amazing time. A number of them have told their parents they really want to go back to the New Circadia exhibit," Robertson says. "Some of the children have become more interested in 3D printing. Some have signed up for 3D printing workshops with the public library."

Robertson's students wrote notes of thanks to the Faculty. Here are a few of them:

When Shawn Dylan Johnston and Siqi Wang were figuring out how to approach their second-year comprehensive studio project, their thoughts gravitated towards mass timber, a new class of engineered wood product.

"There aren't many mass timber buildings in Canada yet, even though this country has the natural resources," Wang says. "And so we decided to try it out."

Tasked with designing a structure to be located in the Golden Mile, a suburban commercial district near the intersection of Eglinton and Warden avenues in Scarborough, Johnston and Wang decided to use mass timber as the basis for a community centre and natatorium.

Their elegant design caught the eye of the Canadian Wood Council, which awarded the pair its Catherine Lalonde Memorial Scholarship, a $2,500 prize given to students whose research exerts a positive influence on the structural wood products industry.

A rendering of the inside of the aquatic hall designed by Shawn Dylan Johnston and Siqi Wang.

For Johnston and Wang, who are now in the third year of their Master of Architecture studies at Daniels, the win was welcome news. "This scholarship enables us to look into mass timber as an alternative choice for structural solutions," Wang says.

Mass timber usually consists of several layers of wood that are glued together in order to form a single piece of material. Certain mass timber products, like cross-laminated timber and glued-laminated timber, are strong enough that they can be used instead of steel beams and concrete in massive construction projects, like tall buildings or bridges. And mass timber has some advantages over steel and concrete: it's lighter, and, because it literally grows on trees, it's completely renewable.

Johnston and Wang's project, which they titled Horizontal, imagines using cross-laminated and glued-laminated timber to frame an aquatic hall with a 50-metre competition pool and a 25-metre leisure pool, as well as an adjacent lobby and cafe. Above the aquatic hall and cafe would be a "bridge" — a Pratt truss structure made almost entirely of timber, with space inside for various fitness activities. The entire building would be arranged around a courtyard with a wading pool that could double as a skating rink in the colder months.

An architectural model of the Horizontal design proposal.

The design uses the gaps between wood panels to conceal the building's electrical and mechanical systems. The resulting structure has a cozy, low-slung appearance that makes for a striking contrast with the stolid big-box retail outlets that the Golden Mile area is currently known for.

Associate professor Steven Fong, who taught Johnston and Wang's comprehensive studio, believes their win was well deserved. "Their mass timber natatorium is an engaging narrative about a public building for our times," he says. "It is also formally resolved and tectonically explorative. Work at this level speaks to a special dedication to architecture, and their award reflects well on the culture of our school."

Information on the other winners of this year's Catherine Lalonde Memorial Scholarships can be found on the Canadian Wood Council's website.

Earlier this month, the Daniels Faculty celebrated the opening of New Circadia — a soft, cavelike environment where visitors are encouraged to linger, relax, and even nap.

In this environment devoted to repose, it makes a certain kind of sense that there would be an area designed solely for preserving memories of what is arguably the best part of sleeping: dreams.

That's what Oneiroi, an installation by assistant professor Petros Babasikas and artist Chrissou Voulgari, was made for.

Oneiroi consists of two booths located inside New Circadia's environment in the Daniels Building's Architecture and Design Gallery. One of the booths is a recording station, with a microphone and a small computer screen. Visitors are invited either to narrate a recent dream (what they can recall of it, at any rate) into the microphone, or to use the computer screen to type up a written description of a dream. The other booth is a listening station, where visitors can lie back on a recliner-like surface, put on a pair of headphones, and hear readings of dreams recorded by others (including the written ones, thanks to some text-to-speech software).

Users can also submit dream descriptions on the project's website, Oneiroi.ca. And the website contains a running archive of all the dream descriptions submitted so far.

"What people write is not necessarily what they saw in their sleep," Babasikas says. "People are processing what they saw and rewriting it. It's not just about memory; it's about remembering and retelling. The Oneiroi project asks: 'What is a space of memory and storytelling in the deep Digital Age, and how do we participate in making it?'"

Inside Oneiroi's listening station, in the Architecture and Design Gallery at the Daniels Building.

The project is a followup to an earlier work of interactive art that Babasikas and Voulgari designed, called Dreamgrove. Like Oneiroi, Dreamgrove involved collecting descriptions of dreams on a website. Visitors to an installation at the Athens Byzantine and Christian Museum (and, later, the Hong Kong and Shenzen Biennale) could listen to the dreams being read aloud. The project ran from 2008 to 2010.

Now, with Oneiroi, Babasikas has noticed something about the dream descriptions being submitted by users: they tend to be shorter than the ones submitted to Dreamgrove a decade ago. "I think people are now used to writing online in more abbreviated, and perhaps precise ways," he says.

As more people contribute dreams, the Oneiroi website will become what Babasikas refers to as an "atlas" — a cloud-like representation of the dreams of hundreds of anonymous strangers, all linked together by keywords, blurring the line between the internet and the collective unconscious.

To contribute your dream, visit Oneiroi.ca or come to the Architecture and Design Gallery at One Spadina. (And follow Oneiroi on Instagram.)

Photographs by Chrissou Voulgari.